


What We're Running From

by subducting



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: (talking to your younger self is a common visualisation in therapy actually), GET READY FOR SOME ...thing, Gen, oooHOOOOOOO, post Timeless Children, probably all though, talk therapy but you're talking to yourself, thirteen calls ten out for being a timelord apologist, thirteen says ten has no rights, this is going to either be goofy or angsty or heartwarming, timeless child more like i cry all the time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:55:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23030527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subducting/pseuds/subducting
Summary: The Doctor is rescued unexpectedly (and accidentally) from her cell by a familiar face and takes the opportunity to lose her shit.POST SEASON 12 FINALE. Spoilers and mentions/discussions of child abuse.
Comments: 32
Kudos: 197





	1. science and visions

_ Run _ , says the voice in their head as they flee Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS.

They never really question it. It’s too restrictive there ( _ because they trapped your mind _ ,) because they’re too pompous ( _ wrapped up in grandeur that they stole from you, used you for _ ,) they’re just too cruel and they’re not like that, ( _ you were a child, and they experimented on you, stole your memories, made you believe you were one of them _ ).

_ I don’t belong on Gallifrey _ , says a voice in their head, and it isn’t until fathomless eons later, in the twice burned ruins of what they thought were their people, they understand how right they were. How right that voice was.  _ Run, Doctor, because you are not safe here. _

In spite of the meddling, in spite of erasing their mind again and again, that instinct remains. So finally, they steal a TARDIS and run away, thinking they’re running from home. Thinking that it’s just a phase of rebellion. Coming to expect the cruelty and the interference, never being surprised by it ( _ why would it be surprising? they have been doing this since they found you.) _

Their so-called people could never hope to contain them. They will run free when the timelords are nothing but a memory of ash and bone.

_ Run _ , says the voice.

They finally know what they are running from.

* * *

Of course, it’s hard to run when trapped.

The Doctor was sprawled in the cold starlight filtering through the window, stunned into stillness by the enormous weight of everything that had happened. She wished she was taking this rest in her TARDIS. Instead of a soft, warm glow, she was granted a spotlight of distant, ancient light that was blinding in the darkness. It picked her out at high points only, illuminating a frozen swoop of blonde and the pale blue of her jacket but leaving most everything else in shadow. Nothing moved or made a sound- no familiar whistles or deep comforting hums, no blinking displays or readouts on intricate little controls. Just her, and this.

Memories and visions tangled like cosmic filaments, thoughts pulled into orbit around one another before colliding and scattering their implications across the fathomless reaches of her mind. Trying to focus on one part of the web set other segments of it shuddering, and she lay in the middle of the threads, stuck like a fly. Every movement she attempted to make to free her mind of the tangle so she could focus on her current predicament only drew the wires tighter, closing around her thoughts like a steel trap, funneling them towards one inevitable place, a series of images she was trying and trying to avoid. A strange thing to do, with one’s newly recovered memories, so long held from her, but they burned in her mind and hearts.

_ She remembered being so small. She wandered an unfamiliar planet, hopeless and homeless, until a new noise split the sky and something arrived. Another face, and a loving embrace. _

The Doctor screwed her face up and tried to push the thoughts away. She didn’t want them right now, she desperately didn’t want them. Not like this, afraid and alone, hopeless and homeless.

_ She fell, and the ground hurt and what came next hurt worse, every single atom burning and reknitting, flesh changing and melting in nuclear fire, impossibly aware throughout the whole ordeal, until she was somehow new and whole. _

She wanted to run. If she ran fast enough she could outrun this too, she’d outrun all of it. Lies and betrayal and pain, she could always outpace. She ran faster than anyone she knew, faster than time itself when the need arose. But she was trapped, trapped in the lies, trapped in a cell, trapped in her own mind, with no way of avoiding what came next.

_ All her mother wanted was to understand, she told herself. Just understanding. She would help her. She’d be good. The suffering and pain were for a reason, she would understand some day. Her mother loved her, didn’t she? She wouldn’t hurt her for no good reason. _

“Enough!”

She didn’t remember getting to her feet or swinging her arm, but pain shot from her knuckles through her arm and she gasped, clenching the fragile digits into a fist and slamming it into the wall again. There was a crunch and a sharp agony connected her fingers to her elbow and fizzed in her bared teeth. She snarled all the more. Pain, oh she could ignore pain. Pain wasn’t new to her, all her existing memories were drenched in it. At some point she almost started relishing it, knowing it wouldn’t break her. Next to running, it was one of the sole threads of her identity that ran through all of her selves.

She didn’t want the memories of her earlier selves. Not when she was trapped, unable to run. Trapped by the Judoon on the outdated orders of the Timelords. The thought settled on her like snow, chilling her into a statue again, staring unseeingly at the wall. Suddenly her bones felt very fragile in her skin. The Judoon had given up on the Ruth Doctor and arrested her instead, and though she knew no more Timelords stalked the skies, she felt their encroaching presence, an echo across the aeons, ash and bone perhaps but no less capable of great malice in the name of their so-called glory.

She backed away from the wall, shrinking to the centre of the space, hating the fear leeching into her hearts. “Wasn’t I afraid enough?” she whispered to the darkness, imagining arching cowls shaped like the head of a battleaxe, “Wasn’t I already scared enough of you?” The oldest and most mighty race in the universe- how had she ever said that with some sort of  _ pride _ ? How had she missed them, grieved for them, wept and wept for them? She felt sick imagining their amusement at all her attempts to save and thwart their plans- how foolish, she must’ve seemed, always a pawn in their glorious power. 

She pictured Rassilon’s smirk with sinking hearts, wondering if he’d ever looked at her through different, kinder eyes. What had become of the person who unlocked the genetic secrets of her makeup and fashioned them into immortality for her people? Surely such a person would place themselves founder? The Doctor dropped to her knees again, furiously brushing tears away with her good hand, bitterness coiling in her mind like a scorpion’s sting. Did Tecteun hide herself because she was sorry for what she’d done? He she given the Doctor false memories to protect her, or to obscure her own involvement in what had happened?

_ She remembered when she’d first asked Tecteun to stop. _

_ It hurt, and she wanted to help, she did, and since she didn’t know the answers she knew Tecteun had to find them, but oh it hurt, and every time she was so afraid. It had been years since she’d last gotten to properly play- she only helped Tecteun now, in her lab, as the woman became more and more fixated on the mystery of her child’s abilities. Every time Tecteun promised it would be the last time, she knew now, she was sure of it, she’d figured out how her child worked, but she needed to test the theory, and wouldn’t her child be brave for her? For all of her people? _

The Doctor was still and cold, knelt on the floor of a dark box with tears dropping from her chin and a broken hand cradled in her lap. No wonder the mighty and powerful Timelords had wanted to hide these memories from her. No wonder the Master had been disgusted. Who would take any pride at all in this? At the very heart of the Timelords was the secret of  _ her _ , and what she had lost for them to exist. They must have hated such humble beginnings, hated the reminder walking amongst them. It made all too much sense now why the elites had loathed her. Perhaps they feared what she would do, if she were to find out. Or maybe they didn’t want her to know how little she needed them. A small part of her hoped it was out of guilt at what they’d done.

She doubted, as more memories filtered in, that guilt had ever been a factor for them.


	2. I warned you not to get lost in the wild

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A familiar face shows up, but for the Doctor the encounter is anything but comforting.

Time had an odd way of moving in captivity. The Doctor’s mind scattered, howling and pacing like a trapped animal, battering against the walls like a winter storm. There was no way to tell time- the stars weren’t eternal, but they may as well have been. She imagined watching them fall to nothing, staring down eternity, faltering lights going out one at a time as the universe switched off the lights and sung a lullaby to no-one. Would she be there to see it? Was that her lot, now? To witness everything? Would the end of the universe find her here, stuck in a long abandoned prison, doomed to vanish and reappear in a flash of gold, in defiance of nature and sanity?

In reality it probably wasn’t that long- the stars were all still in place, the universe still populated, the darkness a long way off. She had returned to her position against the wall, back aching and legs heavy from lack of use, but when the door burst open with a fanfare of alarms, she was on her feet anyway, adrenaline and wild desperation overcoming any weakness in her limbs. She wasn’t likely to get another chance like this- whatever was on the other side of this door, now was the time to make like the Doctor and _ run _ .

Before she’d got more than a couple of paces, however, a familiar figure appeared through the door, and she stopped dead, eyes widening in disbelief. Oh,  _ why him _ \- this was the last face she wanted to see right now. Infuriatingly, there he was anyway. Cocky grin, pinstriped suit, ridiculous shoes… She couldn’t do anything but gape in horror as he careened into the room, gangly limbs all over the place. Well, she supposed she couldn’t judge on that front, but she certainly felt a sudden rush of understanding over all the times she’d been slapped being him as he held his hand dramatically out to her.

“Come with me-” he said, but she ignored him and charged past, roughly shouldering his arm out of the way and poking her head into the corridor with interest.

“What’s going on then,” she asked, not bothering to look at him as he also stuck his head out of the door. They both yelped and withdrew back into the cell as a plasma blast thudded into the door.

“Right, yeah,” he said sheepishly, “I  _ may  _ have accidentally-on-purpose released all the high security detainees. Saw that you’re a priority prisoner held on behalf of the Timelords and, well-”

“Yeah, let’s talk about it later,” she interrupted, as shouts echoed towards them. A slow grin spread across his face and the Doctor had to resist the urge to roll her eyes at her younger self, as they both barrelled from the cell, charging down the corridor.  _ He has no idea who he just freed _ , she realised, searching her memories for this encounter. Weirdly, she didn’t remember. That was troubling- missing memories, more to add to the pile, and the dead Timelords the ones who ordered her arrest-

“This way!” Pinstripes shouted, and they turned a corner and pelted towards a familiar shape sitting at the end of a corridor. The Doctor felt a relieved grin open onto her face and she followed her younger self, throwing herself after him into the TARDIS.

Instantly the ship was complaining- before the young Doctor had even reached the consoles the ship set up a litany of noises, and he frowned in concern. “What’s wrong?” he asked the ship worriedly, hurrying to the controls and flicking several switches.

“I think I am,” she said, breathing heavily and following him. Now that they had stopped running, her limbs were protesting the unexpected action after so long spent disused. The Doctor turned to her and reached into his pocket, withdrawing the sonic. She sighed as he waved it in her direction, waiting for the penny to drop.

“But… but that’s-” he frowned from the reading to her, textbook innocent shock painting his features. She held her arms out with a trademark expression of her own, one she liked to call  _ “resigned to her own chaos” _ .

“You’re me?” he said, eyes roving her. She nodded. Something new and thoughtful and sad stole into his expression and she grimaced. She  _ knew _ what was coming- she didn’t need to remember to know exactly what he was going to say, but she couldn’t think of the right words to derail him before he blundered into the realisation.

“You look just like her,” he breathed, looking stunned. The Doctor blew out a long breath, praying for patience. It hurt, it _ still  _ hurt, and he would be unbearable about it. He could never let sleeping dogs lie, and she was very much not in the mood to discuss lost loves. Not least when she was feeling so very small. Seeing him made her remember  _ being _ him, and his entire existence had been about  _ her _ . The Doctor imagined seeing her now, imagined that blinding, searing warmth. In the cold and dark of the unknown she wished for it more than anything, but she knew, she had the certainty that came with age and loss, that she was destined to be left with empty arms and broken hearts.

Something must’ve crossed her face, because her younger self looked away, eyes full of pain. “Doesn’t stop hurting, then?” he asked wistfully, voice dry and caked in memory, like discarded autumn leaves blowing through a barn on Gallifrey. With the only amount of compassion she could muster to her foolhardy, lovesick younger self, she shook her head and softened her voice. “Never.”

“How long?”

“Over a thousand years,” she replied, and this time it was her who couldn’t meet his eyes. The only thing she had wanted when she was him was for the hurt to stop, for the relentless grief to finally end. Experience had hardened her to it, but it was still there. And when she happened to glance her reflection in a mirror- although not prone to vanity in this form, save for brief moments when the occasion arose- the flash of blonde still took her aback and tricked a cruel hope into existence in her chest, where it faltered and sputtered like a dying flame every time.

The TARDIS was quiet for a long moment, two Doctors wrapped up in a shared grief. It hurt to look at him, and not just because he reminded her of Rose. He reminded her of being younger. She had thought she was so old when she was him. Still stinging from the Time War, full of righteousness and fury, searching the universe for any crusade to join, so always right. He had loved every minute of his adventures, he had been blessed with such joy and freedom. It was difficult not to feel irritable towards him.

“Guessing you’re without transport?” he said uncertainly, and she blinked up at him, speech waking her body from a complete standstill. She nodded, running a hand over her face and collapsing into a chair at the console. “Without… a lot of things, right now,” she mumbled, exhaustion dragging on her, a specific new gravity that leeched strength from her limbs.

“I only glanced at the file on the door…” he began, and she glanced at him from between fingers, “They’re holding you on the orders of the Timelords. Guessing they couldn’t deliver you to them, seeing as…” his face twisted in pain and she felt a flare of irritation. This was after his adventure with Grandpa and bow-tie, and it was unfair to hold her experiences against him, but his mournful expression was far too generous to their  _ so-called  _ people. “Oh, don’t,” she warned, voice terse and dangerous. He narrowed his eyes.

  
“Don’t what?”   
  


“Don’t try and make me feel sorry for them,” she snapped coldly, standing up. He still loomed over her, but judging by his look of alarm her expression must’ve held at least an ounce of the venom she was feeling. A furious grin twitched the corners of her lips as she glared up at him, head weaving like a cobra preparing to strike. She hated people in her space, but herself was a special case. She knew he wouldn’t remember it anyway, because she had absolutely no memory of this conversation. Perhaps that was why her hearts felt so little sympathy for her younger self, his eyes wide and eyebrows drawn tensely.

“What do you mean?” he asked, voice shaken, “We- you- you forgot?” He wasn’t annoyed yet, like he had been with bow-tie. Just shocked. “You forgot how bad it feels?” There was the anger, the impotent fury he loved to wear so much. Her grin widened further, shaking her head. 

“You have no idea,” she breathed, “ _ No idea _ , what’s coming for you. Feel sorry for destroying them all you want, Doctor, it wont make them care about us any more.”

“It doesn’t matter if they were cruel to us,” he gasped, aghast, “Nothing could ever justify- we should never have-”

  
“No, we shouldn’t,” she agreed, “Because we should never have been put in that position. Doctor, they _ used  _ us.” She realised that it was a pointless argument until he remembered. She didn’t have his memories of the events where they’d saved Gallifrey, but she knew he’d recognise them if she shared her’s. She reached her hand to his face in a flash and closed her eyes, digging deep in her memories.


	3. dropping glasses just to hear them break

When she finally grasped the memories they lay hot in her hands, burning her mind as she grappled and hauled them to the surface like a fisherman wrestling with a catch. Gallifrey, on fire, through three sets of eyes, and children and the moment and No More.

No More, what a joke, there had been so much more, so much she hadn’t seen back then. She had torn herselves apart and nearly died a dozen times over to save a civilisation that wasn’t even hers, forgotten that they’d survived and grieved, fallen apart, been left empty. Perhaps worse than the betrayal was the humiliation, the sharp sting of embarrassment of ever thinking herself the custodian of the legacy of the Timelords. Thinking she was so old and wise, falsely believing that pain was the hallmark of true age, believing that she knew what it was to be lost. Stranded in the twisting vines of her former self’s TARDIS, the Doctor felt more lost than ever- a babe in the wood, a lost soul that no-one had ever wanted back, apparently.

Mortified at her own foolishness led her to jab the thoughts sharply into the skinny pinstriped man’s mind, and he cried out, gritting his teeth against the pain as they shredded his awareness with their intrusion, temporally and logically upturning his mind. Memories of the day that Gallifrey didn’t fall burnt and shrieked, and the Doctor had to keep from letting the memories of the ashes she had seen with her own eyes bleed into what sh showed him. The TARDIS gave a disapproving shudder, but she ignored it, hammering the memories into his mind until her own rigid fingers twitched, bones threatening to break out from under her knuckles. Finally he gasped, shoving her roughly away, his paper-thin limbs crumpling against the console.

“Oh- ah!” he winced, putting a palm to his forehead, and the Doctor felt a phantom pain that matched flare in her own head. “Okay, I- oh-” he gasped, childlike suddenly, all-knowing twinkling eyes immediately widening in amazement, “Gallifrey isn’t lost!” he gasped, shaking his head, “But- I- I can’t know this, why are you showing me-”

“I don’t remember this anyway, so I wouldn’t worry about it,” she spat venomously, breathing heavily as she glared at his open, baffled gaze. All she wanted was to punch something, and in the absence of any convenient walls, her past self would more than do. It was counterproductive, but his petulant misery over the loss of their people may as well have been heralded and announced it was so easy to target.

Pinstripes was slowly regaining his composure, chest stilling as he looked her up and down, eyes taking on just a shade of the tiredness she felt. “You were in prison,” he murmured, “You.. is that it? Is that how I end up so cross? I get them back, and they show their gratitude by…. Throwing me in jail?” His hope for a restored Gallifrey was sickening and painful, and she shook her head, still as the night in a graveyard.

“It’s not.”

“Not what?”

“Gallirey, it-” she breathed the words out as if by saying them she could expel the poison from her mind, “It burned. It burned again, it’s gone. I- you, you all saved it and it died again on my watch.”

His face was guarded, wary, but something collapsed in his posture- shoulders that were held proudly to attention moments ago were shifting and tightening, old eyes older again. She ran a hand through her hair, standing to look around. Had the TARDIS really been this dim, when she had thought the Timelords were dead by her hand, when she blamed herself? The poor old girl was in mourning, donning muted shades of condolence and respect.

“So you’re angry with them because… they died on us again?”

The Doctor sniffed. Looked at her former self, so firey and passionate, so filled with grief it’d choke out stars and raze empires.

“We’re not Gallifreyan,” she said simply, and it didn’t make it any better. The vindictive pleasure of taking it out on herself did nothing, didn’t scratch the ocean of bewildered hurt she was drowning in, tossed about like a ship just waiting to be wrecked.

He was slow to comprehend, slow and scared, voice low.

  
“What do you mean, we’re not Gallifreyan?”

“Exactly what I said. We weren’t born on Gallifrey. We- they’ve been messing with us since before we can even remember. We were an experiment, a- a lab toy for them. We’re where they got regeneration! They lied, they lied and they kept on lying, and when the lies didn’t cut it they erased our mind just to be sure!” Her voice was building in volume, climbing to a pitch she hadn’t used in this form, but the rage would be familiar to him, “They lied, and they aren’t ours, we never belonged there!”

Even the TARDIS had grown quiet, the usual whistles and companionable whirring quieted by her tirade, and her former self was shaking his head.

“I remember- I- I was born on Gallifrey-”

“I remember too, and we weren’t,” she sighed, exhausted suddenly. Why had she thought that saying anything to him would help. Naive as always. The awful unknown yawned around her, walls of understanding vanishing and leaving her stranded in a vast, empty chasm of chaos, with no bearing, compass point spinning and spinning.

“No, I-” he was breaking now too, hands running through spiked hair as he paced backwards and forwards as she watched. “I remember, you’re lying, or you’re confused, or-”

“Do you want me to show you what I’ve seen,” she hissed, striding before him and glaring up at him, ice meeting flames with a jet of steam, “Do you want to watch what I had to see? What I found out?”

For a long moment, brown met hazel, both furious and defiant, a shared history of trouble somehow only widening the gulf between them. Her teeth were bared in a frightening grin, his eyebrows were drawn with cataclysmic fury. Finally something in his gaze wavered, a shaking anger that simply evaporated like steam on lava. “Why would they do that?” he breathed, and the poisonous smile slid from her face.

“They’ve always been like this,” she said, and suddenly she couldn’t stand him, couldn’t stand herself, hated her skin and being trapped in a TARDIS that reminded her of better and worse times, “Honestly I don’t know why I’m surprised.” She broke her gaze, shoulders slumping in her coat. She heard him let out a strangled noise, and when she looked his limbs were folding again as he slumped to a heap on the floor, bony wrists resting on his knees as he gazed unseeing across the console room.

She let her back meet one of the spiralling pillars and slid to the floor herself, tilting her head back to stare into the honeycomb ceiling. She wished she had an answer.

“So… we’re not a Timelord?”

She gazed over him, head tilted and sharp eyebrows drawn curiously. Had she really been so proud of that title? All her lives, even the ones she remembered, she’d scorned and mocked and flouted the Timelords’ rules and authority. But there again, even after they’d trapped her, tortured her for the sake of a prophecy and stolen her from herself, she still felt agony filling her hearts at the sight of the citadel in ruins.

“We completed our studies more or less,” she rubbed a hand over her face, leaning forwards, “I daresay that makes us as qualified as anyone else. But we’re not the same. We… regneration. It came from us. It… was dragged out of us, for them to use.” The words were sour in her mouth, clinging to her teeth as she tried to suppress memories that were knocking against her consciousness again. Her voice must’ve wobbled, because pinstripes was jostled from whatever his own chaotic thoughts were by her tone, eyeing her with the same mix of territorial nerves and abject pity she viewed him with. Nothing they could offer one another was likely to be of any comfort. Being alone with her thoughts was one of the Doctor’s least favourite things at the best of times, let alone if she was trapped with her past self, with no way to escape his accusing, somber eyes.

She could tell he knew as much, because he offered nothing. All he did was meet her eyes, searching them as if to see if any of himself remained after so much betrayal. She looked away. Remembering being him was like nuclear fire, veins of regeneration energy slicing through her memories like hairline fractures, and she chose to lock him away in her head, forgetting when she was so desperate to right the wrongs of the time war that she would have given herself to save Gallifrey. She wondered if she’d take the same opportunity, if it was offered to her now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I dont know but I wanted to get SOMETHING out for ONE of my wips.

**Author's Note:**

> HAH, HI EVERYONE, I'M NOT DEAD! HOWEVER, I have had the flu since like last... Thursday? And today is the first day I've been out of bed since friday evening, I've literally been catatonic for a week. ON THE MEND BUT STILL NOT FEELING GREAT, SPEAKING OF NOT FEELING GREAT, THAT FINALE GAVE US A LOT TO WORK WITH HUH? SO EXCITED TO JUST GET ALL UP IN THAT ANGST.
> 
> I will be updated both Clipped and Voices soon I promise I just wanted to yeet something up about All That Good Stuff from last week, ALSO, can you guys BELIEVE that experiment thirteen is straight up CANON? now I don't have to name the Doctor's main attending scientist in this AU, fucken SCORE.
> 
> also, you know, GOD NO MY FEELINGS etc but mostly i'm just like HAH, ESCAPEE EXPERIMENT YOU SAY CHIBNAL, VERY INTERESTING IDEA!


End file.
